PHOTOGRAPHY
REINCARNATION
I am a believer in reincarnation. I believe that the veil between here and next, life and death is incredibly thin. For me a reminder that there is still much magic in the world. Long before we were here and long after we are gone. Perhaps a little playa reminder to take the long view and not get mired in the minutia. Life will progress. In a very roundabout way, I was called to meet a shaman and participate in a peyote ritual in central Mexico in February 2020. . I was unaware but the path to this began more than a year ago. Several weeks before I even knew about the trip, I began having visions. Very clear incarnations of many spirits projecting through myself. Through my face. I began channeling this energy in my dreams. A few days later I came home, stripped naked, got in the shower, and then doused myself with an entire bottle of talcum powder. There was no thought. I was on auto pilot. I dripped food coloring on myself and began taking photos. Portrait after portrait after portrait which began to montage with old paintings each trying to capture the energy which I had seen and felt. I made hundreds of them. I became obsessed. It was a prelude to what I imagined would be a deeply spiritual experience. I am grateful to feel these things. I am excited to communicate with spirit. We have the ability to connect both spirit beyond this physicality and witness the magic that still envelopes this Eden. I am inspired and grateful for that.
DYNAMIC MOTION CAPTURE
Since digital cameras were mass marketed to consumers in the mid to late 1990’s I have taken over 4 million photographs. I was enamored with the immediate gratification of jumping straight past the darkroom to immediately experiencing the capture in real time. When I took photos I would always shoot at least 30 of the same subject from different angles. Always. This style of shooting photography was more focused around dimension, space, angle and motion. This particular series is focused on capturing motion as panoramas comprised of 30 frames ranging from 30 frames a second to 1 minute per frame. The composition allows me to present a moment in time allowing the viewer to experience a few seconds to 30 minutes of time as a singular event.
AI QUERIED PANORAMAS ON GLASS
How do people experience color? The human eye and brain together translate light into color. Light receptors within the eye transmit messages to the brain, which produces the familiar sensations of color. ... Rather, the surface of an object reflects some colors and absorbs all the others. We perceive only the reflected colors. I believe different people experience color to varying degrees in hue, saturation and tone. As a visual person the world has always appeared highly saturated to me. I believe people who are more auditory may not interpret color with the intensity that I do. As so much of our visual language has moved from the CMYK to RGB Universe much of how color is interpreted is decided by algorithm. This series investigates how AI interprets visual data in terms of color. A query using search Red (255,0,0), Green (0,255,0) and Blue (0,0,255) of 4 million photos across my collections yields “red”, “green” and “blue” as determined by the computer. With over 16 million colors online comprised of only three color, RGB, technology is allowing us to experience color in a way we never have before.
ALWAYS "ON"
Long before selfies became mainstream, I had taken 100’s of photos or myself for various projects. Today’s selfies seem to promote narcissism but I was my own subject for practical reasons. I didn’t have the time or money to hire models. Much of the photography was done on impulse. Of the many self-portraits I took one in particular stood out. A self-portrait taken up close in a mirror with a DSLR using the flash. The photo simply entitled “ON” symbolized the mainstreaming of photography via cellphones and the eventual explosion of Instagram. Everyone is ON. Everything is ON. Now everything we see is through the lens of some device. Originally executed a s a screen-print on aluminum it is much more provocative than a traditional “selfie”. What are we shooting? Are we voyeurs? Have we become Big Brother? The white space is actually raw aluminum so that as the viewer walks by the image changes drastically and at the right moment refracted light makes the flash appear to go off. The photo became its own canvas for me. I have used it to explore color theory and by double exposing additional photographs I can highlight any topic I choose. I have executed hundreds of these which I also plan to use in video installations.